The New YorkerModify

“Rate Your Happiness,” your story in this week’s issue, opens with the protagonist, Louise, having a health emergency while on a flight from New York City to San Francisco. Why did you choose to introduce the character mid-crisis?

Crisis often feels like the natural starting point for a story, and medical emergencies in particular have a way of stripping a person down to the nerve. Anyone who has ever been an E.R. patient knows this. Being physically helpless—dependent on whomever is around you to maintain your vitals or inject you with medicine—is the kind of experience that dissolves almost everything you think is fixed about your adult self. Something more particular and tiny and human emerges in its place. I remember a nurse giving me a glass of juice after a minor surgery, many years ago now, and it almost felt like she was the only thing standing between me and oblivion. Moments like that feel like openings, like portals between the invented, fragile certainty within which we spend most of our time and the profound confusion that we are almost always trying desperately to avoid. I’m usually more interested in a character enduring a crisis of some sort, in who they are in that moment, rather than in a character existing in their element.

I think, also, that I write stories and novels out of a feeling of some kind of subterranean, nearly imperceptible, internal crisis that somehow does get resolved (at least temporarily) through the various metaphors and play of the narrative.

The story is told in the close third person, mostly aligning with Louise. There are brief moments, though, when the narrative veers closer to another character: Bruce, the nurse who helps Louise on the plane. Why did you decide to take in his perspective?

“Properly” constructed fiction tends to pick a lane—whether it be the first person, or a close third, or an ambient third—and stay in it. Often, this is a useful guideline, and limits, in general, are very much the friend of the fiction writer, but there are certain stories that benefit from a sense of instability.

There’s a school of dream interpretation that suggests that everyone in the dream represents a different side of the dreamer, and I think a short story can work along similar lines. There is a longer version of this story that takes a few more leaps into a few more characters’ points of view, but every time we step outside Louise’s perspective, I think it’s still somehow tethered to her. It’s a glitchy, imperfect gesture, but one I find myself making when the story allows, and I’m fond of such glitches in other people’s work. Denis Johnson did this occasionally in his short fiction, and I think Joachim Trier’s film “Sentimental Value” arguably flickers between different points of view.

Whatever your philosophical or religious ideas about the self, it’s clear that we have to live with and contend with the limits of an identity in our everyday reality, but I’ve always felt that art and literature provide a wonderful opportunity to escape or distort the self.

It turns out that Bruce used to be involved with Louise’s estranged father, and that both she and Bruce are staying in the same neighborhood in the Bay Area. Later, Louise runs into Bruce not once but twice. How do you think about the relationship between coincidence as a plot device and coincidence as an everyday phenomenon?

One thing that will happen to you if you become a novelist is that when unlikely things occur in life—as they often do—someone might say to you, Oh, you couldn’t write that, and perhaps for that reason I find myself sometimes wanting to include those things in my work, coincidences that happen all the time yet still seem unlikely or too tidy for fiction. This also relates to the earlier question about the choice to allow non-Louise perspectives to intrude in the story. The narrative follows a woman through her confusion about what she should do with her life, whether she should stay with her girlfriend or not, whether she should have more of a relationship with her father or not, and it’s almost as if the world is laughing at Louise’s confusion, surrounding her with absurd things like coincidences and strange children and Bruce and that influencer. Maybe the world of this story is more a reflection of Louise’s character than it is a reality external to Louise’s character.

Louise, as you’ve indicated, contends with ambivalence throughout the story: she thinks she should end things with her girlfriend but can’t bring herself to do so; she feels compelled to share a bit of herself with Bruce yet regrets not keeping him at a distance; she identifies as a techno-pessimist though she’s somewhat defensive of her friend’s techno-optimism. Is this emotional state of particular interest to you?

Years ago, a friend’s husband told me he was “never of two minds about anything,” and perhaps he was just trying to prove a point, or perhaps he was just feeling quite clearheaded that day, but the very idea of living in a state of permanent, seamless single-mindedness has haunted me ever since. Of course, there are some things that I can be comfortably (or functionally) certain about, but it was the “never” in that statement that has stuck with me. Is that really a possible human experience? Am I actually trapped in some kind of permanent open-mindedness limbo? Is this the difference between being a creative person and having . . . I don’t know, a “real” job? Or is it the difference between what we call adulthood and what we call childhood? I find it almost impossible to inhabit a character or a fictive voice that isn’t conflicted about nearly everything.

In bed one night, Louise, unable to fall asleep, recalls something strange she had witnessed years prior: “Hundreds of ants on a concrete porch had lifted the corpse of a cockroach as if they were going to carry it home for dinner, but their communication must have broken down, because instead of hauling the roach away, they spun the roach in a circle while Louise filmed the scene on her phone.” What came to you first, this image or the idea for the story?

This image has been with me much longer than the story. I witnessed just such a spectacle many years ago, and after watching the ants spin the roach corpse for a while, I made a short video of it. I was amazed by the scene, the spinning, how mesmerizing it was, and I wondered if someone more mystical than me might see it as a kind of omen—but of what? In general, I am fascinated by the coöperative efforts and determination of ants (I never had an ant farm as a child but probably should have), and this moment was just as baffling to me as it was beautiful. If there are any entomologists out there who could explain what I saw, I would welcome an e-mail.

This story, I must admit, spent at least two years in a mostly unfinished state. It was only in late December of last year that it all rushed together, and it was then that the image of the ants and the cockroach entered the story. The power outage and ensuing driverless-car melee in December in San Francisco reminded me of it. I wasn’t there for it, but I have friends who were very much in the middle of it.

At the beginning of the story, Bruce asks Louise to rate her pain from one to ten—something that medical professionals are trained to do. In San Francisco, Louise encounters an influencer who asks strangers on the street to rate their happiness on the same scale. What made you want to invert an otherwise routine question?

This may seem crazy, but it was not a conscious decision. I didn’t even realize that these two moments mirrored each other until long after I’d finished the story and was reviewing your edits. When I first began working on the story, I started with Bruce and Louise, but they were in a totally different situation, and though I kept trying to work on it, the narrative resisted me until I set it in San Francisco—a city that’s home to several people I truly adore, but one that’s also absolutely saturated with some of the most ridiculous and annoying aspects of our modern culture. Looking at that choice now, I can see how the setting naturally reflects Louise’s ambivalence about her life in general, but none of that was intentional. As is the case with a lot of writers, a story usually does not want to coöperate with me when I have particular plans or desires, and it tends to congeal the more curious and confused I become. ♦

In September, 2009, Erik Cordes, a deep-sea biologist, sat in a dark control room aboard the research vessel Ronald H. Brown, which was floating in the Gulf of Mexico. Fourteen hundred metres beneath him, a remotely operated vehicle (R.O.V.) was transmitting live video and data from the Mississippi Canyon lease area, a region just southeast of Louisiana that has long been pursued by oil companies. At first, the video feed showed little more than brown mud pockmarked by burrowing worms and snails. But, a few hours into the dive, screens in the control room suddenly lit up with red, orange, yellow, and purple life forms. The R.O.V. had stumbled upon a garden of deep-water corals. “It was like floating through a forest,” Cordes told me. “It was beautiful—a different planet.” An elaborate ecosystem swirled around the coral stalks: brittle stars, glass sponges, sea urchins, shrimp, fish. Cordes was early in his career, looking forward to studying the dizzying biodiversity of the Gulf’s hidden coral communities.

Seven months later, just eleven kilometres from the coral garden, a blowout on BP’s Deepwater Horizon drilling rig caused an explosion that killed eleven workers and sent oil gushing up from the seafloor. By the time the spill was finally capped, three months later, seven hundred and eighty million litres of crude had billowed into the water—the largest marine oil spill in history. Cordes was horrified, but he hoped that his coral forest would be safe: oil floats, because it’s lighter than water. When his team returned to the deep-sea site, however, its brilliant colors were smothered under a blanket of fluffy gray scum. Mucus oozed out of the coral stems, a telltale response to trauma. The researchers realized that a mixture of oil, plankton, and a chemical dispersant—used to break up slicks before they choke coastal ecosystems—had rained down onto the seafloor. “It was shocking,” Cordes told me. “Everything kind of stopped.”

Cordes’s career took a dramatic turn. He would no longer study the unspoiled biodiversity of the Gulf’s corals. Instead, he thought of the tainted ecosystems as E.R. patients; he would conduct a forensic damage assessment. “This was disaster response,” he told me. “We needed to see who had survived. We needed to get to work.” In the years since then, Cordes and his team have followed nearly three hundred individual coral colonies within sixteen kilometres of the spill, recording minuscule changes in color, branch lengths, and physical integrity. One of the researchers on the project found that coral colonies died when they were more than half-covered by the petrochemical goo. According to Cordes’s estimates, twenty-five per cent of the corals he studied have either died or show no signs of recovery. Some were probably centuries old.

Cordes’s cohort of scientists helped to show that the devastation of oil spills goes far beyond our coasts, where birds and fish are the most visible victims. In the surface waters of the open ocean, plankton can absorb oil compounds, compromising their ability to photosynthesize and produce oxygen. When they die and sink through the water column, other marine animals eat their remains, toxins and all. Fish embryos that grow in the presence of oil may be born with heart defects, as well as spine and skull deformities. Still, he took comfort in the idea that American offshore drilling—and therefore many oil spills—might eventually be relegated to history. The Deepwater Horizon disaster sparked new regulations. Oil companies began to turn away from the areas he studied and toward deep-water deposits in other places, including the southern Caribbean and the West African coast. “We were ramping down, at least in U.S. waters,” Cordes said. Then Donald Trump took office for the second time, and in his Inaugural Address he told the nation, “We will drill, baby, drill.”

This past November, the U.S. Department of the Interior released plans to lease up to 1.27 billion acres of public waters for new offshore-drilling efforts. (Such plans don’t automatically translate into new rigs; leases had been available for years, including under the Biden Administration, but regulatory costs and low oil prices had limited their appeal.) The Center for Biological Diversity soon warned that, if the Trump Administration carried out its plans, it could cause more than four thousand oil spills—not including large-scale disasters like Deepwater Horizon. “These catastrophic incidents will become more likely as the Trump administration rolls back offshore drilling safety rules,” the Center said on January 6th. The Trump Administration went on to rescind key regulations from the National Environmental Policy Act, and to exempt drilling projects in the Gulf from Endangered Species Act requirements.

In the past month, since the U.S. and Israel began waging war in Iran, oil prices have spiked, which incentivizes fossil-fuel companies to drill new wells. On March 9th, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management released an estimate of undiscovered oil and gas reserves in U.S. waters; two days later, it sold twenty-five leases, covering a hundred and forty-one thousand acres in the Gulf of Mexico, at record-low royalty rates. Two days after that, the agency greenlit Kaskida, a new five-billion-dollar ultra-deep drilling project southwest of New Orleans, which could start pumping eighty thousand barrels of oil a day as early as 2029. The Gulf is open for business again, and Cordes is bracing himself. “The more drilling we do, the more oil we’re going to release into the environment,” he said. “It’s really that simple.” In the past fifty years, he said, North American waters have seen three catastrophic spills: Ixtoc I, in 1979; Exxon Valdez, in 1989; and Deepwater Horizon, in 2010. “It’s been fifteen years since we’ve had one,” Cordes said. “You can do the math. We’re just about due for another.”

The first offshore oil wells were drilled in California, where black tar has been oozing out of the ground for eons. In what is now the La Brea Tar Pits, sticky pools of asphalt famously trapped dire wolves and sabre-toothed cats. More recently, Indigenous peoples such as the Chumash and the Yokuts used asphalt to make face paint, game pieces, glue, and waterproofing caulk for boats and baskets. When the British captain George Vancouver sailed through the Santa Barbara Channel, in 1792, he noted that “the surface of the sea, which was perfectly smooth and tranquil, was covered with a thick, slimy substance.” The era of oil drilling began not long after James Young, a Scottish chemist, collected a sample of petroleum near an English coal mine in the mid-nineteenth century. He heated the liquid in a flask and collected the condensate, which burned cleaner and was cheaper than whale oil, the standard fuel of the day.

Summerland Beach is a mile-long crest of sand just down the coast from Santa Barbara. The Santa Ynez Mountains rise directly to the north, pinning Highway 1 tightly to the coast. On most days, the surf is loud enough to mask the steady purr of cars. In the eighteen-nineties, oil drillers tapped into pools beneath the sand; new wells crept all the way to the surf’s edge, and eventually into the water. Droves of workmen were hired to build sturdy piers. By 1896, the offshore rigs were operational; their pipes extended down through several metres of water and a couple hundred more of seafloor sediment.

A bust inevitably followed. In 1903, a vicious winter storm reduced most of the piers to splinters, and by 1906 offshore oil production at Summerland had all but ceased. Still, a threshold had been crossed: Offshore wells proliferated. Steel piers replaced wooden structures, and rigs reached farther from shore. Along the Gulf of Mexico coast, drilling ships allowed for mobile “overwater” operations. Floating platforms moved into deeper waters. Between 1954 and 1971, offshore oil production in the United States expanded more than tenfold. Off the coast of Summerland, standalone platforms named Hazel, Hilda, and Heidi were erected in California’s waters, which extended five and a half kilometres from shore. Beyond that, in federal waters, were Hogan, Houchin, and Platform A.

On January 28, 1969, a drill extending eleven hundred metres into the sea floor beneath Platform A punched through a layer of rock and into a pocket of oil. When the crew retracted the drill to replace its bit, an overpowering jet of oil fountained from the well. They managed to plug the pipe, but growing subterranean pressure created cracks in the sea floor. Oil rushed through the sediment and rock and blackened the water. Eleven million litres of oil spread across an area of two thousand square kilometres.

Even after the leaks were plugged with cement, rivulets of oil persisted for months, and the oil spill’s ecological and cultural impacts lasted even longer. Dead seals and dolphins washed ashore. Fishermen found lobsters and crabs painted black and weighed down by oil. It was the birds, though, that seized the public’s attention and launched a movement. From Ventura to Santa Barbara, gulls, pelicans, murres, and grebes staggered along beaches, unable to fly. Locals mobilized to save them; a nearby zoo recommended feeding the birds butter to emulsify and flush out the oil in their throats. According to a Los Angeles Times report, birds fleeing their would-be rescuers instinctively waddled toward the water, and, “falling into the black liquid, they lay in the ooze, crying weakly.” Cormorants that tried to clean each other with their beaks died after ingesting the viscous muck. Others expired from hypothermia: the oil compromised their feathers’ water-repelling properties. Kathryn Morse, a professor of history and environmental studies at Middlebury College, has written that images of these birds marked a turning point in society’s relationship with the oil industry: “They contested older visual narratives of oil as abundant and powerful.” Around the same time, the Washington Post decried “the systematic fouling of our nest,” and the New York Times called the pursuit of petroleum “a survival issue both for sea life and for man himself.”

The political fallout was lasting. President Richard Nixon walked on the beach and flew over the slick in a helicopter. He vowed to take “more effective control” over the oil industry, and opined that “preserving beaches is more important than economic considerations.” The oil spill helped inspire the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Clean Water Act, and the Endangered Species Act. California declared a moratorium on offshore-drilling projects. In a blow to the fledgling environmental movement, however, a report by Nixon’s science adviser, Lee DuBridge, called for more drilling, not less. “The situation which makes leaks possible,” DuBridge wrote, “is the fact there is oil down there. The only way to prevent future leaks is to get the oil out.” In the summer of 1969, less than six months after the spill, several additional wells were drilled from Platform A. An entirely new rig was towed from an Oakland shipyard and installed just to the east of the platform. The offshore-oil industry had weathered the environmental reckoning and emerged intact, and arguably stronger.

More spills polluted California’s beaches. In 1990, a tanker ship ran over its own anchor; a quarter century later, a pipeline on land ruptured, sending a river of oil straight to the sea. In 2010, when I was in graduate school in California, I took a barefoot walk on Summerland Beach at dusk. It was only the next morning, when my soles stuck to the floorboards of my apartment, that I noticed quarter-size globs of tar stuck to my feet, like wads of black gum. I couldn’t find any news online about a local oil spill. Instead, I discovered that such tar balls are so common that they’ve inspired a product called Oil Slick—a beach-tar-remover spray. Oil had permanently altered California’s coast. And yet, when viewed through the lens of today’s oil industry, the drilling efforts in the Santa Barbara Channel may seem quaint. In the Gulf of Mexico, an even more profound transformation has taken place.

The Gulf of Mexico formed about two hundred million years ago, when the supercontinent Pangea split up. During periods of high sea levels, salt water flooded into the basin between North and South America and formed a shallow sea where algae thrived. When the water periodically evaporated, it left thick deposits of salt. Then rivers carried eroded particles—from the Rockies, the Appalachians, and other mountain ranges that have come and gone—into the basin, covering the salt and decaying algae beneath kilometres of sediment. The weight of the sediment had the effect of a slow-motion pressure cooker. Biological molecules were deconstructed and flattened into a tangled mess of mostly carbon and hydrogen. This goo is called kerogen, and geologists estimate that it contains about ten thousand times as much carbon as all the biomass on earth today.

Kerogen is more a category than a specific thing, like jazz, or casseroles. Each molecule can contain more than two hundred carbon atoms, twisted into a dizzying array of rings and folds. At the greatest depths, where temperatures and pressures are highest, the kerogen tends to split into smaller hydrocarbons such as methane, the main component in natural gas. At more moderate pressures and temperatures, oil forms. What makes the Gulf of Mexico such a bonanza of fossil-fuel production isn’t just the sheer quantity of algae that was cooked to the right specifications but also the layers that it’s encased in. Oil and gas infuse the pores of sandstone; layers of impermeable caprock trap it inside.

In 2014, four years after the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe, I boarded the research vessel Atlantis in New Orleans for an expedition into the Gulf. I was early in my career as a microbiologist, and I was hoping to study places where methane naturally seeps from the seafloor, supporting remarkable ecosystems of deep-sea life. At dawn, we began to wind through the misty coils of the Mississippi Delta, passing pelicans that sat on mossy wooden docks. As we entered the Gulf, we suddenly came upon an unseemly jumble of cranes and metal scaffolding—a vast oil rig. More were soon visible all around us, ringing the horizon.

It’s nearly impossible to definitively determine the number of offshore oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico. They are constantly built and removed as the oil market ebbs and flows. NOAA estimates that about six thousand structures have been built over the water since 1942, and many of them remain viable. Some are not much more apparent than a telephone pole. The rigs we saw from Atlantis were more akin to floating cities. There are likely a couple hundred such platforms currently operating in state and federal waters off the coasts of Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas.

Our destination was the Mississippi Canyon—an incision, now underwater, that formed roughly thirty thousand years ago, when the Mississippi flowed more than a hundred kilometres past its modern-day delta. My goal was to inspect calcium carbonate rocks, found near methane seeps at the base of the canyon walls, in search of methane-eating microbes. I imagined that they might be unsung heroes of carbon sequestration in the deep sea, turning methane—a potent greenhouse gas—into rock.

One morning, a few of my colleagues crawled into the ship’s submersible, Alvin, and descended to the seafloor, where they found “microbial mats” growing on mounds of craggy gray rock. At one site, in a trough, they found frozen methane hydrate—bone-white ice—and a thin stream of bubbles. Using Alvin’s robotic arm, they plucked a few rocks from the seafloor. Later, in the ship’s main lab, I placed those rocks in sterile plastic bins and readied my tools; my plan was to chisel off fist-size fragments in search of microbes. Before I could lift my hammer, however, I noticed pinpricks of black liquid covering the rocks. The dots soon became acrid splotches of oil. At first, I mistook the splotches as remnants of the Deepwater Horizon spill. But then I realized with a start that I was seeing a natural process. The rocks, recently depressurized after their journey from the seafloor, were oozing petroleum.

In the end, I found the hydrocarbon-eating microbes that I was looking for. They’re a type of archaea that perish in the presence of oxygen—and they form intricate relationships with bacteria that breathe sulfur compounds. My colleagues, meanwhile, used forceps to pick glistening scale worms and peanut worms from the rocks. The life amid the oil was a stark reminder that, for all of petroleum’s destructive power, it’s still a natural substance, capable of fuelling ecosystems as well as cars. It’s as much a product of nature as orchids or tree trunks. In some parts of the Gulf, hydrocarbons gush directly out of the seafloor. Mud volcanoes ooze liquified brown sediment and emit shimmering curtains of methane bubbles. Oil stalagmites emerge from the seafloor, pulled upward by their buoyancy. Asphalt ribbons form “tar lilies” that resemble toothpaste squeezed from a tube.

Considering the quantity of hydrocarbons that are naturally entering Gulf of Mexico waters, what exactly constitutes an environmental disaster? If some oil sloshes off a ship or leaks out of a pipeline, what’s the difference? Mandy Joye, an oceanographer specializing in microbiology at the University of Georgia, has spent decades characterizing microbes in hydrocarbon-rich habitats across the Gulf. Her discoveries have underscored a key biological principle: virtually every flavor of hydrocarbon can be eaten by something. However, the microbes that digest them are often found at low abundances: they are members of the “rare biosphere,” and, under typical conditions, they can take months to replicate. Ten times the normal rate of hydrocarbon seepage, Joye told me, is “probably the cutoff between a natural process these ecosystems can handle, and an anthropogenic disaster that they maybe can’t.” Above that threshold, the microbes can’t keep up.

The other problem is when the oil goes places it shouldn’t. The oil industry amounts to a vast program of oil relocation and transformation. It sucks crude from subsurface rocks into metal pipes, tanks, and refinery reservoirs, spitting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere all the while. When this relocation process breaks down, and viscous black liquid flows into marine environments, plants and animals are evolutionarily unprepared. The Center for Biological Diversity estimated that the Deepwater Horizon disaster harmed or killed more than eighty thousand birds, six thousand sea turtles, and twenty-five thousand dolphins and whales. Oil coated twenty-one hundred kilometres of shoreline; it suffocated salt-marsh grasses and oysters and, by weakening root systems, accelerated erosion. One study valued the environmental damage at $17.2 billion. These assessments focussed on surface waters and coastlines—the part of the Gulf we interact with most frequently. Yet much of the oil never made it to shore; it fell into the deep sea. What, exactly, happened down there?

There’s a theory in the study of microbial ecology, attributed to the Dutch polymath Lourens Baas Becking, that “everything is everywhere, but the environment selects.” The first part—“everything is everywhere”—argues that the swirl of wind and water transports organisms to every habitable nook and cranny on Earth. The second—“the environment selects”—suggests that environmental conditions produce microbial winners and losers. (A photosynthetic algae may sink to the seafloor, but it’s not going to survive in complete darkness.) The hypothesis is imperfect, but one could see its principles at work in the aftermath of Deepwater Horizon. Scientists have understood since 1913 that certain microbes are capable of degrading oil; many of them make up a tiny minority of the microbes in a given ecosystem, but they were present in the Gulf.

In May, 2010, Joye was the first microbiologist on the scene of the spill. She was part of a monitoring effort that sent a water-sampling device within a hundred metres of the discharge zone. When they pulled water samples on board, the bitter scent of hexane—a component of petroleum—permeated the respirator that Joye was wearing. “Those samples were the nastiest thing I’ve ever seen,” she told me. She watched with disgust as a colleague’s protective gloves disintegrated around his fingers. Over the years, she and her fellow-scientists sampled the water dozens of times. They assembled a detailed account of the microbial population during different phases of the oil’s degradation.

About half of the oil from Deepwater Horizon accumulated in a soupy plume that hovered at a depth of around eleven hundred metres. Within about a month, a lineage of Oceanospirillales microbes proliferated, feasting on cyclohexane. (Microbial populations inside the oil plume were about two orders of magnitude higher than in the uncontaminated water, and ninety-nine per cent of them had oil-degrading properties.) A few weeks later, Cycloclasticus stormed onto the scene, fuelled by a range of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon molecules. Then came Colwellia, feeding off short chains of oil-derived hydrocarbons such as ethane and propane. Once the well was capped, the community shifted again: microbes from the Flavobacteriaceae and Rhodobacteraceae families mopped up longer-chain hydrocarbons. In the water above the blowout, Baas Becking’s aphorism proved true: the key players were lurking the whole time. As the plume’s chemical profile changed, different types of microbes bloomed and then receded in a sort of ecological relay race. Joye estimates that thirty to forty per cent of the oil was degraded by microbial communities—a feat for which we can only be grateful.

Even so, tens of millions of litres of oil swirled through the Gulf. Much of it was lofted by tiny gas pockets into the upper water column, only to fall back downward after the bubbles fizzed into the atmosphere. The effect of the sinking oil, Joye told me, “was like dropping flypaper through the water column—all of the biology was just getting stripped out and moved to the seafloor, as were the nutrients associated with those organisms.” In some places, fish catches declined precipitously in medium depths, which Joye attributes to nutritionally barren conditions.

The effect on deep-sea organisms was even more dire. Five centimetres of flocculent “oil fluff” blanketed the seafloor, the equivalent of thousands of years of sediment dumped in just a few months. “It was completely absurd,” Joye said. For crabs, worms, and other invertebrates, “there was nowhere to run and hide.” Cordes, the coral researcher, said that some of the oil-coated corals recovered, but most didn’t. They lost branches, and their withering skeletons were colonized by hydroids. Deep-sea corals operate on different time scales than their shallow-water relatives; they can live for thousands of years. As the oil settled, centuries of growth were undone. These ancient ecosystems “are easy to remove,” Cordes told me, “but impossible to replace.”

Conservationists have become creative in an effort to rescue damaged habitats. The area around an oil spill can be seeded with “probiotics” of naturally occurring, hydrocarbon-eating microbes, which help shallow-water corals fight oil damage three times faster than corals left to their own devices. Artificial corals can give deep-water marine life a place to live; cat sharks, for example, wrap necklace-like egg cases around any structure, natural or not, that sticks up from the seafloor.

Even the infrastructure of the oil industry can become a habitat. A “rigs to reef” strategy converts derelict wells into scaffolds for new reefs—empty apartment buildings, essentially, welcoming new denizens to move in. In the Gulf, more than six hundred offshore oil-and-gas platforms have been “reefed” since the eighties, and many are now oases for fish such as amberjack, filefish, spadefish, and red snapper. (They’re also often overrun by invasive orange-cup corals and lionfish, which crowd out native fauna.) The deep sea may wind up full of these prosthetic habitats—ecosystems that function in some ways, but that remain diminished and hollow compared to their natural state.

Even after studying deep-water corals for three decades, Cordes continues to make new discoveries. By 2024, his team had mapped nearly all of an enormous reef off the Carolina coast, perched a thousand metres down. “It was this incredibly diverse, beautiful coral reef,” he told me. There were some species he’d never seen before. He often wonders how many hidden coral ecosystems could be destroyed—and how many were lost before we even knew they existed.

One of his most painful findings emerged among the gray, oil-coated corals near the Deepwater Horizon blowout site. Purple-pink brittle stars still clung to the corals, their tendril-like arms wrapping around the branches like yarn. In late 2010, Cordes and his team noticed that some parts of the corals had cleared up: the brittle stars were removing the oil, revealing vibrant yellow tissue beneath. It was the first direct evidence of a mutualistic relationship between the two species. The brittle stars got an elevated perch from which to feed; the corals got a cleaning.

Deep-sea scientists rarely have a chance to return to the same places, but Cordes continued to revisit his Gulf corals. Nearly a year later, he was in the control room of the Ronald H. Brown, watching live video from a decimated coral garden known as MC294. He leaned forward as the R.O.V. approached an intricate coral colony that he’d come to know well. When he spotted its distinctive dendritic branches, its off-kilter lean, and its patches of healthy yellow tissue, he was heartened: the coral was on the road to recovery. But something was missing—brittle stars. After cleaning so much oily residue off the corals, Cordes concluded, they had died. “It was tragic,” he told me. “It felt like, in order to see these fundamental truths, something awful had to happen.” ♦

This is drawn from “The Dark Frontier.”

Ben Lerner’s new novel, “Transcription,” is less than a hundred and fifty pages long. It is slim and sly—“quieter” than his three previous novels, as he puts it—but, like all of Lerner’s books, it teems with erudition and artistic ambition, exploring the instability of memory, the mediating powers of language, and the “new-old” complexities of technological change. Lerner is an accomplished poet, but it was his début novel—the restless but self-assured “Leaving the Atocha Station,” which came out in 2011—that made him a literary celebrity. Since then, readers and critics have looked to each of his new novels to reinvigorate the form.

“Transcription” begins with the narrator, a middle-aged writer, on his way to interview his mentor, Thomas, who is near the end of his life. Thomas, an eminent artist and scholar, is protean and stubborn, aging and ageless, keenly attentive and impossible to pin down. (His character is a composite evoking several of Lerner’s actual mentors, including the poet Rosmarie Waldrop and the filmmaker and writer Alexander Kluge, both of whom were born in Germany.)

Shortly before he gets to Thomas’s house, the narrator (whom Giles Harvey, in a recent review, dubbed “an intellectual klutz”) breaks his phone, and thus has no way to record the interview. Throughout “Transcription,” the characters are constantly mishearing, misremembering, and missing each other’s bids for attention and affection. But life can, in rare cases, provide more emotional closure than fiction. Earlier this year, Kluge, at ninety-four, read an advance copy of “Transcription.” “I am impressed by this text,” he wrote in an e-mail to Lerner. “I find it friendly but also very independent and poetical. The text had not only to do with me but with both of us . . . You write at the end of your message ,with love.‘ I would like to repeat ,with love‘ from my side.” He died two weeks later.

Lerner and I spoke recently in my living room, in Brooklyn. In person, he takes himself less seriously than you might expect. But he doesn’t apologize for taking his “responsibility to art” seriously (although, characteristically, he immediately asks aloud whether “responsibility” is the right word). We talked about “Transcription,” Trump, our late grandmothers, and, inevitably, the ascendance of A.I. chatbots. On a table between us were mugs of black coffee, which we both finished and refilled; a plate of dates and pastries, which neither of us touched; and an audio recorder. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

I want to be able to speak freely, and I want you to be able to speak freely, and in order to do that I think you should have more freedom than usual to take stuff off the record. My journalistic-ethics justification is that, because we know each other, I don’t want to take something that you told me privately and inadvertently drag it “on record,” if you want it to stay private.

You can ask me anything. I feel totally at ease. Sorry that I’m stupid. It could be the cumulative effects of COVID, I’ve decided. And cardiac bypass. And stupefaction of the far right.

And screens. You also have to blame the screens.

Yes, right, screens. I forgot about the screens.

O.K. So I’ll turn this on. [Turns on audio recorder.]

Has that recorder been used when you’ve been embedded with the far right? Am I getting the chance to share the hardware with the—

Yeah, this hardware has been enchanted by a multitude of voices.

[Laughs.]

Your new book, obviously, is about interviewing. When I read it, my first thought was, Poor Ben, he’s going to have to sit through a really annoying publicity tour where all these interviewers say, “I’m interviewing you about a book about interviewing—isn’t that clever?” Then, later, I thought, But if I were to interview Ben about his book about interviewing, that would be really clever.

What actually made me want to do this as a Q. & A., though, beyond the superficial pattern-matching, is that the interview scene in this book isn’t just used as a plot device. It’s also a way to explore some of the preoccupations that show up across all your novels. For example, the theme of superposition—put very simply, the idea that characters exist in a number of potential states simultaneously, some of them mutually exclusive, and this ambiguity or multiplicity doesn’t get resolved until some point in the future. Which is also a way to think about what we’re doing now: talking to each other in the present but in a way that only really makes sense if there’s an audience in the future. So I want to talk about what the interviewing does in the book, but, first, can you lay out its premise?

Well, what sets it in motion is that this middle-aged writer goes to Providence, where he went to college, to interview his ninety-year-old mentor, Thomas, who usually doesn’t give interviews. Thomas is ailing, and this is almost certainly going to be his last interview. When the writer gets there, though, he drops his cellphone—his only recording device—in the hotel sink. So he’s phoneless.

The narrator thinks he’ll go to Thomas’s house and say, “Look, this embarrassing thing happened.” But, when he gets there, he finds himself strangely unable to confess that he doesn’t have a way to record the interview. Then the interview happens, and Thomas is swinging between lucidity and senility, and a million things about their relationship come up, and the fiction records the interview the phone couldn’t capture. So the book starts with this interview that both does and doesn’t take place.

The book is very interested in questions about the role of technology versus the role of the artist. It’s also noticing how phones are distracting and enervating, which is, on its face, a very familiar observation.

Right. There wasn’t a book in me that was merely about showing how our attention is degraded by our phones. The book became writable when I thought of its project as partly about restoring our wonder before the weird fact of the disembodied voice that is made possible by different media, like voice mail and radio. I was interested in that séance-like, new-old, ancient-but-very-contemporary charging of the air around us. You’re right that there is a risk of being merely diagnostic when you write about things like cellphones. What fascinates me is the idea of making it seem like more of an ancient, dangerous human capacity to sever the voice from the body.

Getting together and talking is something we do, but we wouldn’t normally be talking in this register. Normally, it would be sort of ridiculous for me to say, “Ben, how did you discover this new voice?” But I can talk to you this way because of the future audience that we both have in mind.

Some version of this happens in all your books—an imagined future opens up new possibilities in the present. “10:04,” for example, is set in New York City when people are anticipating a big storm. While the storm is looming, there are new glimmers of possibility—friends can become lovers, strangers can become friends on the subway, the supermarket aisles are charged with meaning. Then the storm doesn’t come, and what they did in that past retroactively becomes sort of ridiculous. There’s an analogy between that and what we’re doing now. Because these interviews are edited and condensed, the parts of it that get cut out will retroactively make those parts of this present moment sort of ridiculous.

Yeah. An interview intensifies this reality, but, even in a normal conversation, there is a sense in which, when you’re talking to someone, you’re also talking to other people, and you don’t necessarily know who you’re addressing through the medium of your interlocutor. The imagined future audience is just an extreme version of the way that speech is always more than an interaction between two people.

Can you say more about what you mean by one person “talking through” another?

One thing I love about novels is that they’re really good at showing how supposedly spontaneous speech is just repurposing overheard or assembled or collaged material from other influential speakers—the voice as a tissue of other voices. In my last novel, “The Topeka School,” I was really thinking about the voice as an intergenerational technology. That book involved a version of me channelling a version of my parents’ voices. I was interested in questions like, How does your mother’s or father’s voice get in your voice? How does your debate coach, the music you’re listening to on the radio, the bankrupt contemporary political speech that’s circulating around you, inflect your voice? Adam Gordon, the book’s protagonist, is always passing off someone else’s language as his own.

I’ve also been thinking about how many of the voices that I know and that are in my head—the voices of writers, artists, relatives, et cetera—are actually fictions produced by different strategies of transcription. For example, one of the things that went into the writing of this novel was my experience interviewing the great poet Rosmarie Waldrop, in Providence. And I don’t know if you’ve done an interview like that, with a literary figure, but—

I’m doing one right now.

Yeah. But Rosmarie is a crucial literary figure. Anyway, I did this one for The Paris Review, and, the way the Review does it, they’re heavily edited. People are given a chance to look at their comments. Things are moved around. You cut down a lot of tape into a relatively pithy exchange. The result is a document that has its own authenticity but is by no means a transcription of the actual conversation that took place. The Review did a great job, but it was disorienting to have had these conversations, and then to see that what was going to be transmitted was real in its way but not a transcription of the experience I had. It was a fiction, in that regard.

Do you recognize your own voice in interviews?

I tend not to look at interviews that I do after the fact. If I do, I don’t really recognize myself.

But then, sometimes a voice or a sensibility does feel captured in a transcript. When my grandma was in assisted living, in Cambridge, she participated in this interview project. Her answers to questions about her past were very matter-of-fact and generic-seeming, but somehow, when I looked at this document, it was just redolent of her personality and sensibility. It was overwhelming for me to read after her death. But I cannot point to any particular moment in the transcript that captures her voice.

I don’t know if it’s about speech rhythms. I don’t know if it’s what’s left out, or the moments of hesitation, when someone else would have generated more language. I just mean to say that there’s both the way that transcripts are fictionalizations and there’s the magic by which language does manage to encode not only a voice but the present absence of the body. I think that these questions—of what a transcript inadvertently records, or fails to register, or falsifies—are ancient questions about writing, and they’re also very contemporary questions about accountability, about the record, about being able to be anchored in the real.

One character says to the narrator something like, Maybe, on some level, you wanted to fail to record your last interview so that you could protect yourself from losing this person, because the recording would be too definitive.

Yeah, I think that’s right. This is not something that the book gets into, really, but I know you’re thinking a lot about A.I. We’re in a moment where the replication of the voice is totally possible. It takes, what, I think three seconds of an audio clip to be able to generate audio in a person’s voice? I do think that that kind of verisimilitude is frightening in all sorts of ways, but it also makes me wonder, Well, what are the special powers of the comparatively low-tech, but nevertheless technological, way of registering a voice that is the sentence, or the line of poetry, or novelistic dialogue?

You’ve said that, like all poets, you believe in the magical power of words. But you also recognize that their power has limits.

This is kind of an aside, but I’m remembering a Trump rally in the summer of 2016, when the implication of what he said was clearly that someone would take Hillary Clinton out if she came after the guns. Now that wouldn’t even count as a scandal, but it was a scandal at the time. And Trump said something like, Look at the transcript. I never said that. And it was true—I mean, this is kind of the definition of the dog whistle, I guess, back when we still had dog whistles. [Laughter.]

But there is this way that affect and intonation and implication, those things are precisely what wouldn’t show up in a transcript. So it’s interesting to think about what part of politics is that which escapes transcription, that escapes that kind of record.

This is one of the many underappreciated aptitudes of Trump’s art form. He’s incredibly good at leaving things out of the transcript. Which, as you’ve pointed out, makes him a kind of poet. Your poem “The Circuit” starts with a few lines that are just quoting Trump verbatim. You quote Reagan in “10:04” and Bob Dole in “The Topeka School.” When you were working on this new book, did you think at all about whether it would be more or less political, in an overt sense, than those previous books?

Well, this book is much quieter. I wanted to write a book that explains very little and makes a lot felt. Political situations, especially in relation to COVID, are around the edges of the book. And the questions about why these children are in these deep protests against contemporary life—refusing to go to school, refusing to eat—are inseparable from their inability to imagine a future. Thomas’s character is also a way of posing questions about the relationship between politics and media now. I mean, he says his earliest childhood memory is hearing Hitler’s voice on the radio.

One dichotomy that’s set up in the book is between the language of poetry and the language of law. Thomas, an artist and a critic, keeps saying, Why do we have to be so literal? We speak in the language of literature, not the language of law. Max, his son, is a lawyer, so he wants the real. One way to understand that conflict is to say, No matter how close we try to get to the real, it’s always mediated.

For me, as a fiction writer, dialogue has always felt like the most potentially embarrassing moment of any work, because it’s the moment where there’s a maximal bid for realism. It’s supposed to be mimetic of speech. But, if everyone speaks in perfectly grammatical sentences, it’s not realistic. And if you actually try to register the fragmentation and cacophony of speech, if you try to be a recording device in that literal sense, the signal can be lost in the noise. At best you have sound art. The degree to which dialogue seems to require cleaning up speech or letting it dissolve into a complicated soundscape—trying to get the level of mediation right—that’s a central novelistic problem that I’ve always been interested in.

You once published a long prose poem called “The Media.” Thomas is a media scholar, a multimedia artist, and also a kind of medium. Can you say more about the preoccupation with media, with mediation?

I mean, all of my books—and many of the books I love—involve staging encounters with media, whether that media be a painting or a poem or a phone. In “Leaving the Atocha Station,” pay phones are really important. The narrator has an important conversation with his mother on a pay phone. There’s also a scene where a woman recounts talking on a pay phone when she was in New York City, and feeling the reality of her father’s death hit her in a different way precisely because she could feel her distance from Spain, where she’s from, so acutely.

For me, one of the most memorable moments in Proust is when the narrator first hears his grandmother’s voice on the phone. The phone is a totally new experience for him, and, when he hears her voice at this distance, she’s suddenly old. The new technology disembodies her voice, such that he’s already experiencing her as a spirit.

I didn’t know we’d be talking so much about grandmothers, but I actually associate one of my grandmothers with Proust, because she was in this sort of Talmudic Proust reading group, where they would cyclically reread Proust and then go to France. My other grandmother, when she was losing her memory, she was very anxious about being untethered from her loved ones. One way she stayed tethered to me was through a standing phone call. I started at The New Yorker back when there were desk phones, and she would call my desk phone every day at five o’clock.

What were your grandmothers’ names?

Clare was the one who called on the phone, and Dorothy was the Proust.

Obviously, “Transcription” is not a book about grandmothers—Thomas is no grandmother—but it is about generationality.

My grandmother Rose, when she had dementia, became convinced that the staff at the assisted-living place where she lived were coming into her room when she wasn’t there and subtly altering her paintings. Rose had collected art her whole life, cared a lot about her paintings, and was disturbed, obviously, by this fact that wasn’t a fact. Then, eventually—and this gets weird, because I remember this being something my dad did, and my dad claims that I did this—either my dad or I said to my grandma, “You know, Rose, you know these paintings better than anyone, so if you say they’re changing, they’re changing. But you’ve got to admit, the staff is doing an excellent job. There are no smudges on the glass. They’re being really respectful.” My grandma got quiet for a moment, and she said, “You’re right, they’re doing an excellent job.” And that was the end of her worry about the paintings.

Maybe I mention this memory because I associate it with this moment in the book where the narrator talks about Thomas’s “art therapy.” The narrator, when he was an undergraduate, had this breakdown in which he was hearing voices. When he got out of the hospital, Thomas showed him an auditory illusion where, basically, if you listen to a recording with a voice in it, and then convert that recording to a MIDI file and play it back—now without the voice, just a computer piano playing all the notes, including the notes that were in the voice—you’ll hear the voice that isn’t there. Thomas plays this for the narrator and says, Look, everybody can hear voices, it’s just a question of the conditions being right. We all err together. What Thomas does is socializing and normalizing. To me, the relationship to the grandmother’s story is that, there’s this hallucination, and then there’s a way of making the experience of distortion feel shared. That’s part of what makes Thomas a great mentor for the narrator. But the other side of that is when Max goes to Thomas with concerns about his daughter or his wife, his experience is immediately aestheticized.

Yeah, and he says, “My daughter is not a work of fiction.”

Right, exactly. Thomas oscillates between using art in this therapeutic way, and aestheticizing experience in a manner that leaves his son alone. And that’s the difference between being a mentor and a father.

I don’t know if it’ll be read this way, but I do think this is, centrally, a book about parenting. And it seems to me that the things that make Thomas worse as a father are the things that make him better as an artist.

Max says something about how you don’t want a spirit medium for a father. The inexhaustible fecundity of Thomas’s mind—that kind of associative logic, and the way that he takes over conversations and brings them to these wild domains—is exactly what Max doesn’t need around the death of his mom, for example.

Or the parenting of his child. I was thinking about this when I was straightening up the house preparing for you to get here. Thomas’s house in the book is itself a kind of work of art. And I’m like, O.K., that’s the house of someone who is solipsistic. My house would never be a work of art like that, because I have kids, so it’s full of just, like, random plastic crap.

And Max talks about how that house in Providence was not a place that had any evidence of him being Thomas’s son—there was never any position for him. It’s interesting, us talking about our grandmothers, because there’s also Thomas’s connection with his granddaughter. It’s a very strong and close connection, but it’s precisely the kind of connection that is enabled by his not having to provide certain kinds of daily care. He can be this wizardly figure because other people are taking care of the question of her eating disorder or whatever else.

My fascination with the difference between being a mentor and a father was, to a certain degree, my displacement of this question about responsibility to kids and responsibility to art. I guess I don’t know if responsibility is the right word when it comes to art.

When I was tidying, I was, like, The really obvious evidence of child chaos needs to go, but I’m not going to doll the place up because we’re not on camera—we’re not being recorded in that way. And then I remembered, you never know with novelists and poets. You’re never entirely on record, but you’re never entirely off record, either. What if, in five years, I pick up a novel and it’s like, “He had made some pathetic attempts to straighten up—literally pathetic, in the sense of inspiring pathos. There were a few houseplants that were either dead or in the process of dying . . . ”

Yeah, it’s true. And it’s very unpredictable what kind of reactions people have to being fictionalized.

Wait, did you say “predictable” or “unpredictable”?

Unpredictable. Most of my experiences with how this can go awry I shouldn’t speak into a recording device. But coming into print is a weird transformation. It’s weird even if it’s not published, to just know that someone has tried to capture you, some aspect of you, in prose. I mean, there is something really basically disorienting about that doubling. Like, there are two of me now. Or I’m no longer the author of my own experience.

And the fictional one will outlive me.

It’s certainly in a more durable body. Yeah. I mean, all of that is really powerful. One can have a series of intellectual positions about it, but it is ultimately a magical or metaphysical thing. There is just something risky about taking real experience and transposing it to the plane of art. And then there are these interesting questions about, like, well, how much does something have to be modified before it ceases to have a magical connection to its source and reality?

You brought up A.I. before, and I’d like to hear you talk specifically about A.I. and what it’s doing to writing, to poetry, to fiction, to the sentence. But it’s interesting—when I think of A.I., I often think of it in terms of the written word, but you brought it up in terms of the voice.

A few years ago my brother left me an A.I.-generated voice mail in my own voice. It just said, “Hey, Ben, this is your brother. I just want you to know what this new technology can do. Imagine if I called Mom and asked for your Social Security number.” And then he left one in Spanish, one in Hindi, and one in Mandarin. And it was—well, it was horrifying.

But I do also think that every time there’s this radical extension of the ability to capture or reproduce the voice, or the image, et cetera, it creates an interesting counterpressure on the arts it supposedly renders obsolete. What can your art do that isn’t totally supplanted by this other technology? Well, one thing is that when a human transcribes a human voice the two voices interact in unpredictable ways, and all of this can be beautiful. All of this registers the texture of the lived, of duration. Transmission isn’t just about verisimilitude.

I think one response to this is just to get really interested in the specific social conditions of the transmission of the human. There’s a way in which you bypass part of the problem of A.I. and writing if you’re just interested in writing that was done by humans. Like, me, I’m just actually interested in how the bodies and voices of the dead were transferred to the page, and the moment of inscription, and what it means for me to receive that in the present.

What if we cross the singularity of being able to know for sure?

I think we already have. But I think the Turing test isn’t the right way of thinking about literature. Because it’s also possible to just say, I want to be part of a human community, I want to know the things I’m reading are written by a human, because what I value is the channel opened between the compositional moment and the moment in which I’m reading. Of course you could fool me. But that doesn’t mean that I still can’t read books that I know are written by humans, and enjoy the particular pleasures and pathos of that kind of experience.

The visual-art equivalent would be me showing you something my kid did, and saying, If it were framed and it were put in a museum, you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference. Sometimes that’s totally wrong, because people are overestimating their kids or underestimating Joan Mitchell or whomever. And sometimes it’s right, but it’s right in the wrong way, because it gets the social conditions of reception wrong. That is to say, Yes, like, if you put this work in a museum context and I encountered it there, I might, in fact, have a pretty interesting experience.

So you’re saying that that’s not you being fooled, that’s you participating, collaborating with the work?

Yeah. And it’s also a way of saying this incredibly boring thing, which is that context matters. And the whole social contract around the work of art is part of the experience. It is part of the phenomenology of looking and thinking about art.

This is a coincidence, but it’s kind of fascinating to me that in “10:04” you have this stuff about hands blurring, or disappearing from photographs, or merging into the background in this Joan of Arc painting that the narrator is seeing at the Met. And now, one of the first places people tell you to look to check whether something is A.I. or not is at hands. It also reminds me of one of my favorite Onion headlines: “Frustrated Novelist No Good at Describing Hands.”

Do you know this great Carlo Ginzburg essay about clues and art attribution? He talks about this guy, Morelli, whose big insight was that if you want to know what’s a real Rembrandt or not a real Rembrandt, don’t look at the face of the Virgin. Look at the fingernails. Look at the earlobes. Look at the things that were basically unconscious. That’s where you find the signatures of authorship. It also brings to mind one important part of the social contract of art, to my mind, which is the idea of the handmade.

The narrator of “Transcription” goes to the Harvard Museum of Natural History to see an exhibit of these intricate glass flowers, made in Germany and shipped to America after the Second World War. And it’s profound for him, but also profoundly destabilizing.

For sure. He has this experience of seeing the flowers as real flowers one second and as artifice the next. He sees nature as culture and culture as nature. But, in this account, it’s not just that the flowers are artificial. What’s important is seeing the flowers as a history of small decisions—human decisions. That these glassblowers did the impossible work of trying to get the styles and stigma right, shaping the glass in these little blue flames. The power of the artwork is not just the verisimilitude of the final product.

Small human decisions that were also embedded in history and contingency and politics, right? Part of the power of them also is that they come from Dresden, and before he sees them he’s only just learned about the city being firebombed during the Second World War.

And that they were passed down. The flowers were made by a father-and-son duo. They’re intergenerational labor that emerged from a particular relationship. I can imagine that there is or will be some technology that could make better, more perfect versions of these glass flowers. If you showed them to me, I’d be, like, Wow, 3-D printers are really powerful. But none of the experience that’s so central for the narrator would take place.

The other thing that’s relevant about seeing that history of small decisions is that it really is about the magical ways that time is encoded in an artwork. And that is totally threatened by these new technologies. But, again, I think that whenever something threatens to obsolesce—and we’re in a moment where everything seems to be threatening to obsolesce—that is also an opportunity to refresh the value you take in the specific medium. When the book is no longer the default unit of cultural circulation, it’s also an opportunity to think about, like, what it is that you really love about the codex form.

Codex is also the name of OpenAI’s coding software.

[Laughter.] If you’re looking to this account I’m giving for, like, a way out, it’s not a way out. But, like, even the way that this book is short and small—I wanted it to be that way in part so that you kind of are reminded that the book, too, is a handheld device. As these things seem so dwarfed or eclipsed or rendered absurd by other powers, they’re also opportunities to think about the powers of these specific media. And there is a little bit of a reënchantment of the artwork and its capacities precisely at the moment where you can no longer take any aspect of it for granted.

Do you have the temptation, which a lot of people do, to completely look away from these new technologies—A.I., for example—to simply disengage from and refuse to look?

No, I look at it all the time. I talk to it all the time.

How do you talk to it? Are you typing or using voice mode?

Only writing, for some reason. I had this heart surgery, and during that time I was talking to Chat all the time about medical stuff. Sometimes because there was information that it could actually be useful about. Oftentimes, because I was just availing myself, for better or for worse, of its constant willingness to read back to me whatever reassuring things I was unknowingly begging it to say. I was not developing romantic feelings for Chat, but I could feel the way that one would develop an emotional dependency on the very reliable rhythms of its reassurance, and on its ability to detect what I wanted to hear.

I mean, people get so attached to individual models that when a model gets deprecated there are protests.

That’s why I’m getting Claude. To keep myself from cathecting.

You’re gonna be poly, like everyone else.

Exactly.

Even without the A.I. stuff, one could have made the case that we live in a post-literate, audiovisual society. To me, though, there is something in your books that is almost fundamentally anti-cinematic. It’s unable to be reproduced in any other medium, more so than many other novels.

To me, the power of the novel is its distance from the technologies whose consequences it wants to describe. Proust didn’t try to make “Remembrance of Things Past” a telephone. He used the ancient resources of prose in innovative ways to capture what it felt like, what it did to his experience, when there was this new thing called the telephone. There are specific things that the medium of the novel is good at.

It’s a totally inexact analogy, but you can think about A.I.’s relationship to writing as something like the invention of photography for painting. You say, O.K., well, these are the things that the photograph can do that no longer seem like the specific areas of investigation for painting. So what can painting specifically do? What is the version of that for literature in the face of A.I.?

But I don’t know. This shit is crazy. And its power overwhelms that kind of analogy.

All the narrator would have had to do is turn on his recorder for three seconds, and Thomas’s voice would be eternally reproducible.

Totally. But that kind of presence would obliterate all the significant distances. And haunting is about distance, the presence of an absence. I think that’s the argument of the book, in a certain way—it’s that the voice that isn’t just totally reproducible—externally, objectively—but is in you, and might be encoded in an artwork, haunts you more intensely, and is ultimately more present. ♦

Listen and subscribe: Apple | Spotify | Wherever You Listen

Sign up to receive our weekly Books & Fiction newsletter.

Catherine Lacey reads her story “Rate Your Happiness,” from the April 13, 2026, issue of the magazine. Lacey is the author of five books of fiction, including the novels “Pew” and “Biography of X,” both of which were short-listed for the Dylan Thomas Prize in 2021 and 2024, respectively. Her memoir and novella, “The Möbius Book,” was published in 2025.

For a few moments, Louise had been sure that she was dying, that a valve or a vein in her body had gotten clogged or burst and she was going to expire right there in the back of the plane, pathetic and dehydrated, travelling alone, hurtling through the air somewhere high above the Midwest, and during those queasy moments that seemed to be her last, Louise didn’t think of her parents, who would survive her, and she didn’t think of her brother, in Montana with his ranch and several children, or of her sister, in Miami, and she didn’t even think of her plentiful minor and major regrets; instead, Louise thought of her small, dark apartment back in Manhattan, how dirty it was right now, how full of humiliating artifacts, like that brochure from a “skin rejuvenation” clinic she’d hidden in the bathroom, and the several worn romance novels stowed under the bed, and the fridge full of decaying takeout in Styrofoam clamshells, as she’d been going through a tough time, a long tough time, and Louise thought of the situation with Diana, how their relationship, if you could even call it that, had accelerated rapidly during the first month but then lost inertia and turned weird, and yet Louise knew that, if she really did die, Diana would retroactively make their whole thing sound a lot more serious than it had been, and relish telling everyone, for the rest of her life, that her girlfriend, Louise, had tragically died on a flight to San Francisco, and Diana would probably start talking about grief all the time and join more than one support group for young widows, and she would add a third day to her biweekly therapy sessions, and maybe she’d even wear a veil—it wasn’t out of the question—a little vintage veil and pillbox hat, and, dear God, she was so beautiful, which made their moody little relationship even more upsetting, even more of a letdown. All of this passed quickly through Louise’s mind as she gripped a headrest in the last row, on her way to the bathroom, trying to stay on her feet as her vision tunnelled, as her knees softened, as a cord of drool dripped from the corner of her mouth.

She fell into a woman in a wool cardigan who reacted in time to calmly lower Louise to the floor of the galley kitchen. After alerting a flight attendant, the woman vanished into the rest room to avoid further entanglement. The last thing Louise saw before losing consciousness was this woman’s face, wrinkled in an unapologetic way, old, shamelessly old, defiantly so. It seemed there were fewer and fewer of these faces around.

“Are there any medical professionals on the plane?”

The airline’s policy stipulated that flight attendants no longer ask only if there was a doctor on board when a passenger passed out, as passengers were often passing out, much more often than most people realized. Now they would accept anyone who could take a pulse. Fewer and fewer availed themselves. They had their noise-cancelling headphones and their prestige television; the possibility of lawsuits frightened off the most qualified. Veterinarians volunteered in disproportionate numbers.

Louise was out for no more than two minutes, and by the time she came to she’d been propped up against a beverage cart, and some man was kneeling at her side.

He was taking her blood pressure when he saw Louise’s eyelids flutter open. He dabbed at the sweat on her brow with a cocktail napkin and pushed a lock of hair out of her face, tucking it carefully behind her ear.

“Are you with me?”

She nodded.

“What’s your name, honey?”

“Louise.”

“Louise? Well, where’s Thelma?”

He was trying to lighten the mood, but her eyes indicated an unlightenable mood, so he retreated. “I’m just being silly. I’m just being awful. My name is Bruce.”

She became aware of the oxygen mask on her face, a cool whisper spilling its way up her nose. Louise focussed everything there. She’d passed out because she’d run out of oxygen and now she was being refilled. Awful. Did he really say awful?

“And what year is it, my friend?”

“2025.”

“What month?”

It took her a moment. “December.”

Her voice was weak and muffled by the mask, but Bruce had leaned in close.

“Who’s the President?”

She didn’t want to say. She hated all Presidents. She shut her eyes.

“Do you take any medications?”

“No.”

“No meds. All right. And did you have any breakfast today?”

“Yes.” Louise always ate breakfast. “Toast.”

“Toast? That’s all?”

“Toast and an egg.”

Maybe it had been the egg. How long had that egg been in the fridge? Could have been months, really. What was wrong with her, she wondered, both generally and specifically? What was wrong with her body? Why had everything with Diana gotten so strange? Louise was still too weak to move, but she began to cry. Bruce elevated her legs on a life jacket and wiped away the tears while two flight attendants stared down at her with vacant impatience. One of them was mechanically eating a packet of pretzels.

“Are you in any pain?”

“Some.”

“Where?”

“Everywhere.”

“Can you rate the pain on a scale of one to ten?”

She thought for a moment.

“No.”

“With zero being no pain and ten being the worst pain you’ve ever felt in your life?”

“No.”

Bruce frowned at her, then turned to ask the flight attendants if she’d hit her head in the fall, but the flight attendants hadn’t seen it happen. The one eating the pretzels ate her last pretzel, then crushed the little metallic bag in her fist.

By then, Louise had regained enough oxygen to ask a question of her own. “Are you with the airline?”

“No, honey. I’m a nurse. I just happened to be on the plane.”

“On the plane?”

“We’re on a plane.”

“Sir has a very discerning eye.”

Cartoon by Roland High

Copy link to cartoon

Link copied

Shop

She knew that. She didn’t want him to think she didn’t know that.

“Yes.”

Louise stared up at Bruce with the sincere yet dazed seriousness of a terminally ill child. No one was paying him to do this. It was so wild what people would just do.

She thanked him, then told the flight attendants that she was very sorry for the trouble. No one responded to Louise, but Bruce smiled an almost imperceptible smile.

“The airline,” she stammered, “the airline should give him a free ticket.”

“That’s not our policy,” one of the flight attendants said.

Twenty minutes after hitting the floor, Louise had enough energy to stand and return to her seat, but she was still pale, so the flight attendants arranged to have Bruce moved to the seat next to hers.

Once she was vertical, shame and anxiety arrived; she was not an adorable and delicate child who deserved the care of helpful grownups but, rather, a 1099-receiving adult with the kind of health insurance that didn’t cover anything, and would certainly not reimburse her for expenses incurred out of state if she, as she had been advised, sought medical attention upon landing.

After Bruce had stowed his personal item and settled in beside her, and had been given an extra tomato juice for his service, he looked through the films and TV shows available for in-flight entertainment, but nothing appealed. He glanced at his phone, then put it away. He drank down his can of juice in one go, opened and closed the flight map, reclined his seat slightly, then pushed it upright again.

“How’s that reading now?” Bruce checked the number on the oxygen monitor still clipped to Louise’s finger. “Ninety-five. That’s good.”

Louise apologized for having interrupted his flight, but Bruce insisted that he was happy to help, that it was no problem at all. He did not admit that he’d been a little disappointed that it was such a minor issue, and not something exciting, something like an aneurysm, which would have required an emergency landing. He liked to make a difference in people’s lives, a big difference, and to do so at all times, if possible.

“Where do you work for real?” She wasn’t especially in the mood to talk, but sensed that he was.

“Mount Sinai. Upper East.”

At which point she remembered that her father had a friend named Bruce, a nurse who worked at Mount Sinai, someone she’d never met but whom he’d mentioned, on and off, for a few years, during his erratic visits to the city.

What compelled Louise to ask Bruce if he knew anyone named Harry from New Orleans? What compelled her to say his last name and his profession, and to confess that this man was her father?

Bruce was visibly shocked, and Louise smiled, nodding. “Yes, he’s my dad, yes.”

The recent deprivation of oxygen to her brain had perhaps washed away her good sense, as her father was not a topic of conversation she enjoyed, nor had it ever been a good idea to associate herself with him, as she knew he had a habit of betraying friends and lovers—it was never clear who was who—and leaving them with resentments, debts, and unresolved issues. Her father moved through the world like a cruise ship, promising a gaudy good time, a break from reality, yet he mainly left waste and hangovers in his wake.

“What are the odds! How is Harry doing?”

“He’s fine.”

“That’s good. Still in Alaska?”

Harry had never lived in Alaska, but it sounded like something he might have told people.

“Still there.”

Why had she brought him up? Why? Now she had joined herself to Bruce with the bruised intimacy of family.

“You’re the designer, aren’t you? Like, high fashion or something?”

It would have been a stretch to call her tiny label with a cult following high fashion, but she had quit the industry years ago now, tired of the instability and the long hours, tired of the fashion people and the Fashion Weeks and the everything. After a brief stint in marketing, she’d had a mild nervous breakdown and tried to pivot to an even more impossible career in acting, but that hadn’t panned out either, so then it was costume design, but there was something so lonely about making clothes for fictional worlds, and, after two other false starts, she’d ended up narrating audiobooks, specifically murder mysteries, and now she’d developed enough of a reputation to enjoy steady work, and there were even listeners who sought out her particular voice reading those brutal stories.

“That’s crazy,” Bruce said, to each turn in her career history. “That’s literally crazy. That’s the craziest thing I’ve ever heard.” Though he made this last declaration with almost no affect at all.

To change the subject, Louise asked question after question about his life as a nurse, about his habits, his schedules, and how he stayed up for so long, and whether he had ever considered doing anything else.

“For, like, five minutes I wanted to be a journalist, but Dad told me that it was impractical, that I had to study something real, like plumbing, or carpentry, or nursing.”

Bruce’s father had been dead for ten years, but Bruce still teared up when he spoke of him. The tears came and stood alert in his eyes, looked out at the world, then retreated.

No one had ever suggested to Louise that she do something practical, but she didn’t let herself consider why that might have been.

“How’s it reading now?” He checked the oxygen monitor again. “Ninety-six. That’s good.”

At this, the two strangers returned to a parallel silence for the rest of the flight, both of them thinking about their fathers while trying to think of something else.

The moment they hit the ground, Louise sent Diana a text—“fainted during the flight for some reason. got hooked up to an oxygen tank. maybe I’m dying lol”—and watched her phone for a while, waiting for a panicked response, but nothing came.

When Bruce asked where in the city she was staying, Louise was grateful to have a reason to stop monitoring her phone. It turned out that they were going to the same neighborhood—“What are the chances! What a small world!”—so they shared a cab, and it was only then, only once Louise had regained her color and reëntered the more natural light of the world, that Bruce could see it.

“You look so much like your dad.”

“People say that sometimes.”

“And you don’t like it?”

“Well, I don’t mind it—I really don’t—but I don’t see it.”

But of course she did mind, and she did see. That was just the problem. Big, sad, stupid eyes that gave everything away, that bulged when he was angry, when she was angry, though they both tried not to be so angry, tried and tried with mixed results. Harry had once been angry about the indignities of the world (Ronald Reagan, the degradation of the Louisiana wetlands, the AIDS crisis), but as he’d gotten older he became angrier about his own tragedies: that his wife had left him, that his father had been a scammer, that everyone always abandoned him, that even the dogs he’d adopted had fled.

For Louise, it had been the opposite. She’d first been angry about her parents, her heartbreaks, her missed opportunities, but in recent years it had shifted, and now she was unmanageably pissed about corporate control of the government, tax-supported genocide, ICE raids, and the way people boarding trains always tried to muscle their way on before the people exiting could get off. These were communal angers, though she took them all so personally, and the fire of her fury fed endlessly on the era.

“I don’t know . . . what Harry . . . told you about me. . . .”

Bruce was blushing. It had taken every shred of his limited courage to bring up Harry again. “Well, Harry and I were very close, and I cared for him very much. And the thing is, I don’t really know what happened, for him, on his side. But, if he called, I’d be happy to hear his voice. You can tell him that. I wish him the best, I—I really do.”

She looked out the window.

“Do you talk to your dad much?”

“Not really.”

“Does that bother you?”

They were in San Francisco proper now, their cab surrounded by white cars—driverless cars, covered in cameras—that all belonged to the same company. Each carried one passenger in the back seat, all of them busy on their phones.

“No.”

Bruce wanted to give her advice, to say it was important to have a relationship with your father, but he stopped himself. There was nothing particularly paternal about Harry; he’d seemed to Bruce something like a little boy who’d lost his mother in the grocery store but was trying to play it off like he was simply there on his own, just doing a little shopping.

The cab arrived at Bruce’s stop first, and he asked if she wanted to meet up for coffee that week—“Sure, of course”—though Louise wasn’t so sure. They exchanged phone numbers, and as the cab pulled away she unthinkingly found and played the last voice note her father had sent her, two years prior, which she had saved and never replied to:

You’re unhappy about your childhood, and I can’t help you with that. You had a perfectly happy childhood and now you remember it being awful because the culture—the culture wants you to be unhappy about your childhood. And that’s not my fault. It’s not anything I did. I can’t understand you, why you want to suffer, why you want me to be the bad guy, and it doesn’t make a bit of sense why you have to be so unhappy about the life I worked hard to give you. So, that’s it. That’s what I’ve got. You can take it or leave it. Makes no difference to me.

The recording ended, and the cab-driver acted as if he hadn’t heard it. They arrived, silently, at Joan and Lynn’s address, and the driver got out to lift her luggage from the trunk. Her friends were waiting on the sidewalk, smiling and holding hands. They opened their arms and embraced her.

That evening, as Louise sat at the counter in her friends’ kitchen, watching Joan cook and waiting for Lynn to get off a work call, a response finally arrived from Diana: three exclamation points, and no actual words. This was unusual, as Diana often communicated in paragraph-long texts, or in voice messages that Louise had to play on double speed only to discover that they contained no real information at all.

She stared at the “!!!” for a while, waiting for the rest of the text to arrive, or perhaps for Diana to call, or at least for an “omg baby are you ok?!” But nothing came. Diana might have lost signal on the subway, or in an elevator, or maybe she’d dropped her phone down a sidewalk grate again.

Joan and Lynn’s eldest daughter, the ten-year-old, climbed onto the barstool beside Louise.

“Long time no see, lady.”

The child was speaking like a baby gangster, yet earnestly. Louise tried to engage her with the secret handshake they’d come up with on her last visit, but the effort failed.

“Kid stuff,” the eldest daughter said.

“That’s your aunt Lou,” Joan shouted without looking up from her cutting board. Neither Joan nor Lynn had any sisters, so all their friends were deemed aunts.

“I know,” the child said.

Louise had always felt unsure of how to interact with the eldest daughter. She possessed an abnormal calm. As a toddler, she’d never cared for peekaboo, displayed little interest in toys, and, from the moment she could stand up, she’d station herself at her parents’ bookshelf, as if reading the titles and making little judgments about her mothers’ taste.

“You’re getting so tall!”

“I’ve never been able to figure out why adults find it necessary to point out the increasing height of a child.”

The eldest daughter stared squarely at Louise, waiting on a rebuttal for a few moments before she gave up, took an eight-hundred-page fantasy novel from the counter, and retreated to a reading nook built into one of the window recesses.

The younger daughter had arrived with foreknowledge of the role her older sister had already claimed. She took the other route in turn, spending all six years of her life wearing a perpetual grin and giggling through almost everything she said. Earlier that year she had decided that she would wear only pink and yellow—down to her socks, underwear, and pajamas—and that she would like to be referred to as Sprinkles. Her parents had complied without question.

“Are you still dating the same woman?” Lynn had ended her call and immediately made a pair of pastis cocktails, a particular blend that she and Louise had invented in college. That everyone else found the drink too bitter to tolerate was part of the appeal.

“Diana?”

“Is she the model?”

“No, that ended a while ago.”

“Lemme see a picture.”

Diana had set her own best selfie as Louise’s lock screen—smiling, her hair blown back, the Manhattan skyline behind her.

“I thought this one was the model.”

“Diana’s a publicist.”

“And how’s it going?”

“Her work?”

“Obviously not—I mean the relationship.”

At that moment, Sprinkles ran into the room, laughing as she handed Louise a bouquet of slightly wilted dandelions she’d picked in the park that morning, then ran away.

Unaccustomed to living with someone like Sprinkles, Louise was nearly moved to tears by this delivery of weeds, but Lynn had barely noticed. When Louise hung out with her friends who’d become parents, she always wondered if they were paying either too much or too little attention to their children—but maybe it was impossible to pay exactly the right amount of attention to a child. Maybe that was just the problem.

“I mean, is it serious, or what?”

Louise took a long sip of her drink. “I don’t know.”

One of the issues with Diana, Louise explained, was that she had this habit of nonchalantly telling anyone—strangers on the subway, her dog-walker, bartenders—the most dramatic things that had ever happened to her, and maybe that was fine, but she really did seem to enjoy shocking people. Her older brother had been murdered when she was nine, and Diana brought it up a lot.

“Well, that does seem like a pretty big trauma, right?”

“Except it was actually a half brother and she’d met him only once, and she didn’t even find out about it until she was, like, fifteen or something.”

“I find that worrying about what might happen takes my mind off worrying about what has happened.”

Cartoon by David Sipress

Copy link to cartoon

Link copied

Shop

“Maybe it feels normal to her to be so forthcoming,” Lynn offered.

“See, that’s the problem.”

“What’s the problem?” Joan asked, settling in beside them with a glass of white wine.

“Diana. She’s—I don’t know, I think she’s too dramatic. Everything is either the best or worst thing that’s ever happened to her. Nothing’s just normal.”

Joan and Lynn were staring at Louise with entirely blank expressions. Was she being ungenerous? A self-hating woman? She could never be sure.

“I don’t know. I wonder if I’m the right person for Diana.”

“But are you happy when you’re with her?” Joan asked.

“I guess sometimes I am.”

Louise touched her phone screen to look at the picture of Diana again—gorgeous Diana smiling into the wind, all that thick hair billowing. She had sent no further texts about the fainting incident.

“Well that’s something, isn’t it? I mean, you can’t be happy all the time. But sometimes is good.”

“I guess so.”

Louise didn’t want to admit it to her friends, but, for some time now, she had been trying to work up the courage to break things off, while always getting sucked in deeper. She’d met Diana’s mother accidentally, and she’d rationalized making Diana a copy of her keys by telling herself that it was simply more convenient this way, and somehow they were planning a trip to Greece in the summer, as Diana was friends with a Greek shipping heiress whose family owned several homes. But Louise changed the subject. Talking about Diana only reminded her of the radio silence. It was one thing to always be on the verge of breaking up, but it was quite another to be ignored after a near-death experience.

Dinner was a delicate salad that Joan had made from thirty-seven dollars’ worth of farmers’-market produce, and a fresh pasta from an extraordinarily expensive local business that the residents of the Lower Haight enthusiastically supported. There was no kid-friendly option for the girls; there never was. Instead, they had the same meal as their parents, dining at a child-size table in a corner of the kitchen. Once they’d finished, the children cleared their dishes and wiped their table down with a spray bottle and sponge. Louise couldn’t help but watch them, amazed by their coöperation and efficiency, but Joan and Lynn continued, you might say, to ignore their children.

That night, just as she was falling asleep, Louise was visited by an image that occasionally haunted her, something she’d seen late one night, years earlier, on a trip through a rural corner of Oaxaca. Hundreds of ants on a concrete porch had lifted the corpse of a cockroach as if they were going to carry it home for dinner, but their communication must have broken down, because instead of hauling the roach away, they spun it in a circle while Louise filmed the scene with her phone.

Louise got out of bed, groped her way across the dark room, found her phone tethered to the charger, then scrolled back through her photos to find the grainy twenty-seven-second video of the ants. She watched it twice, checked Diana’s profile for any activity (there was none), considered texting her, refused her own suggestion to do so, then got back in bed.

A message from Diana had come in overnight: “out DANCING call u tmrrw.” Louise mentally drafted and rejected possible replies as she ate pancakes with the eldest daughter, but sent nothing.

“Do you have a cellphone?”

Louise started to get it out, assuming the girl wanted to show her something.

“No, I don’t want to see it. But you should get rid of it.”

“Well, I mean, your moms have cellphones.”

Louise sometimes felt like a little sister in the presence of the eldest daughter, engaged in endless attempts to earn her favor.

“I’ve spoken to Lynn and Joan about the issue, but they’re too far gone.” She put her fork down. “It’s actually really sad if you think about it.”

“So you’re one of those anti-tech kids.”

“I might be the only one.”

“Well, Lynn has a pretty complicated job, so it might be hard to—”

“She has three phones. Did you know that?”

“Work, personal, and . . . ”

“Two work phones. That tells you something, doesn’t it?”

“Momma Lynn is very busy,” Louise said, and again the eldest daughter deployed that withering stare. She shouldn’t have said “Momma,” though Lynn and Joan referred to themselves this way. The eldest daughter stood and put her plate and fork in the dishwasher.

“We agree on a lot of things, philosophically, Lynn and I. But she’s been weakened by techno-optimism.”

Aunt Lou felt a moment of real terror for this child, a fear that she would never be able to accept the world as it was, that she might have the makings of a domestic terrorist, a demagogue, a far-right podcaster, or worse. It was an aunt’s job to assess a niece like this, wasn’t it? She could see the potential personality flaws in the girls and love them without the warping furor of maternity.

At the same time, Louise felt an angry presence inside herself, a need to tell the girl that it was Lynn’s techno-optimism that paid for her cushy Bay Area life—her private school, her fresh pasta, her renovated duplex. But, instead, she just smiled at the back of the eldest daughter’s head as she left the room.

It wasn’t that Louise hated San Francisco, but it was impossible not to notice, while in San Francisco, that it was absolutely full of things she hated. Alone on a walk through the city, she narrated her hatred to herself. Someone was always pitching their startup to someone else, and people were always on a jog, but almost no one was ever walking to a particular destination, and those not jogging were isolated in their hermetically sealed S.U.V.s, forever trying to park. There was a blithe, mildly stoned look in everyone’s eyes, and most of the women were dressed like gnomes while all the men appeared ergonomically outfitted to climb a cliff face but were instead commuting to their office jobs.

The driverless cars were the newest hateable thing. Louise crossed in front of one as it idled at a stop sign, then she stopped for a moment in the center of the intersection to stare into all its cameras. The passenger in the back eventually looked up from her phone, noticed Louise, and locked eyes with this bewildered-looking woman blocking the crosswalk. Louise then hurried to the curb and turned to watch the car whirr away.

A decade ago, back when she could still hold the eldest daughter with one arm, Louise hadn’t possessed or desired a smartphone. It had been easy for her to declare at the time that she’d never get one, never be so enslaved, but then she’d started freelancing for a company that had made it impossible to get into the corporate headquarters without scanning a QR code, and she’d caved, humiliated, though no one seemed to remember her previously staunch refusal. She’d left that job after a few months but kept the phone, and now it was in her back pocket, pressed against her ass as she waited for it to vibrate.

After two hours of walking and hating, Louise arrived at Union Square and took a break on a bench equipped with spikes that made it impossible for someone to lie down. She felt the sun on her face and watched people walking through the open plaza.

In the middle of the square, a man was frantically running around, carrying a microphone and what looked like a large gilded frame. A few people were filming him with their phones; some were trying to get away from him while others struggled to get closer. He wore a bright-orange suit and a purple tie, a costume that only added to Louise’s confusion. Soon, enough of a crowd had formed around him that he was no longer visible.

“What are the chances!”

Louise turned to see where the voice had come from, but he was right in front of her, emerging from the throng. It was Bruce.

“Imagine that!” He sat on the bench beside her, on the other side of a spike, then went in for a one-armed hug.

She asked if he knew what was going on with that crowd, that man, and Bruce said it was the Rate Your Happiness guy.

“The what?”

“The influencer? He asks people to rate their happiness on a scale of one to ten.”

“That’s it?”

“It’s sort of interesting. I watched him for a little while. But you! What about you? How are you feeling? Have you seen a doctor?”

She had already forgotten about the fainting, and it was only then that she realized she hadn’t even told Joan or Lynn about it, though she would tell them that night over dinner, as a backstory to explain how she’d run into Bruce and spent most of the afternoon with him, how they’d walked around the city for a while, then impulsively stopped in a crystal store, where Bruce had cried, all of a sudden, just started crying the moment he found out that Louise and Harry hadn’t spoken in two years.

“That would have been around the time I got his postcard from Alaska.” The young man behind a glass case full of obsidian offered Bruce a tissue. “He said he’d moved there and that he was thinking of me, but there was no return address, and when I tried to call him, someone told me it was the wrong number.”

So he had, maybe, moved to Alaska.

“Do you think something’s happened to him?”

Louise had always assumed that her sister or brother would call if anything serious occurred. They were still in touch with him, as far as she knew.

“I’ll ask my sister.”

“Oh, would you? Oh, gosh, I’d love to hear from him. I hadn’t realized how much I—I hadn’t realized, you know, how worried I’ve been.”

Then Bruce told her that the whole situation reminded him of something from his favorite novel, a title that Louise had heard of but never read. Bruce recited several lines from it, from memory, right there in the crystal store, and the boy behind the counter applauded him at the end. But as Louise recounted the scene to her friends that evening, all she remembered was the last line: “So much shines in absence—whereas presence, high and lonesome, can tire.”

Lynn, frustrated not to know the source, began searching for it on her phone, but nothing came up. Louise must have gotten the quote wrong and couldn’t remember the book title, so she promised Lynn that she would text Bruce about it, but she didn’t really mean it and was already hoping that Bruce would forget about her and fail to get in touch again.

“High and lonesome,” he’d said in the crystal store. “Don’t you love that? Doesn’t that seem true?”

A few days later, Joan and Lynn loaded the girls and Louise into their van to go for a hike in the park right across the Golden Gate Bridge. Schools were closed for the holidays, and the weather was still unseasonably mild, so thousands of other well-resourced families were on their way to do the same thing. The traffic was heavy, especially where each car had to wait its turn to enter the one-lane tunnel into the Headlands.

“It feels like we’re commuting to work,” the eldest daughter said, and no one responded except for Sprinkles, who giggled to herself and said, “Work,” then giggled again.

As soon as they’d arrived, and parked, and set out on the trail, the sheer force of nature did seem worth the trouble. They all fell into a satisfied silence for a while, until the eldest daughter gave a speech about how ridiculous it was that they’d driven all the way out here when they could have walked through the park near their house and seen the same ocean.

Once the group reached Rodeo Beach, however, even the eldest daughter seemed to silently agree that it was a perfect day, a perfect plan. Joan rolled two enormous blankets out across the stony sand and asked Louise when she’d last visited the Headlands. Louise said that she’d never been here, that they’d always said they’d take her someday, but the weather had never coöperated.

“But I know we came once, yes, at least once,” Lynn said. “A couple years ago?”

“It was seven years ago, because I was three,” the eldest daughter declared, without looking up from her Jane Austen novel. “We watched a vulture eating a dead pelican, and Aunt Lou threw up.”

“What? I don’t think I ever—”

“No, you totally did. Right there on the beach.”

There it was again, that little-sister feeling.

“How do you not remember that?”

The eldest daughter put her book down as she asked this, and Louise thought Joan or Lynn might reprimand their child for her tone, which was pandering and barbed, but when she looked to her friends they were staring out at the ocean. Sprinkles was balancing a few stones atop one another with great concentration.

“I mean, I’m just curious,” the eldest daughter said, her voice veering meaner and meaner. “If it happened to you, then why don’t you remember it?”

“Well, I’m . . . ” But Louise really didn’t have a reason.

“I read somewhere that people with bad memories are actually happier, in the long run,” Joan offered.

This reminded Louise of the Rate Your Happiness guy—had they ever heard of him? Lynn had seen his videos, and her company had even worked with him once on sponsored content. She thought the whole thing was ridiculous, because basically everyone he asked said eight or nine, and whenever someone said something lower, he’d grill them about it until they changed their answer.

Their cellphones didn’t really work in the Headlands, but one of Lynn’s work phones was tethered to a satellite, so she was able to stream a few of the influencer’s posts, which were edited together at a breakneck speed, squeezing a dozen micro-interviews into a single minute. The newest one had been uploaded just hours earlier, and Louise, despite herself, searched for her face in the background. She wasn’t there.

“Can we turn the phones off, please? We’re supposed to be bonding as a family.”

And all the adults obeyed the eldest daughter.

On the hike back out to the car, the trails were even more crowded, and, as another group approached them on a narrow part of the path, Louise noticed the old woman from the plane, the woman in the wool cardigan, the last face she’d seen before passing out. The old woman’s face lit with recognition, and what, indeed, were the chances of this? Once they were closer, however, her expression turned quite serious, and she reached out and took Louise by the shoulders.

“Your father—” she said, pinning her reddened eyes on Louise.

“My what?”

“Your father and I think it would be best if you asked for a prenuptial—”

The woman’s daughter intervened before she could continue. “Sorry about that.” The daughter peeled her mother’s hands away from Louise. “She’s here, but she’s not here.”

Lynn and Joan and their girls were several paces ahead, and had seen nothing. Louise considered telling them what had happened, the wild coincidence of it, but then she remembered that the woman on the plane had had gray hair and this woman only had gray roots. So it wasn’t a story after all. She kept it to herself.

Louise didn’t hear from Diana, or from Bruce, for several days, and she assumed that that was it, that they must both have given up on the Louise situation, but on the last full day of her trip, as she was leaving the duplex for a walk, she nearly ran into Bruce on the sidewalk.

“We have to stop meeting like this.” He was cradling a large rabbit as if it were a baby.

“What the—”

“Oh, this is Elmo. Well, St. Elmo Rattlesnake Jumper Cables Lancaster-Johnson.”

Cartoon by Roz Chast

Copy link to cartoon

Link copied

Shop

He smiled at her, then added that Elmo was his friends’ pet and he was taking him for a bath at the vet down the street.

“Walk with me, talk with me,” Bruce said, as if referencing some old bit that they shared. They walked together, first to the vet, then aimlessly, giving each other reports of their time in San Francisco, making the usual complaints that New Yorkers make about the West Coast. They scowled together at the driverless cars, and Bruce made jokes about his friends’ polycule.

“I mean, the sheer optimism of the whole thing. The logistics. Where do they even get the energy?”

Louise genuinely laughed at this, so maybe they weren’t so different, she and Bruce, and maybe they could, as a team, solve all their troubles and traumas with her dad, with his Harry. In a lull in the conversation, she thought of asking him if he and her dad had been boyfriends or something, but she couldn’t get the phrasing right in her head, and before she could say anything Bruce interrupted her thoughts.

“You look sad.”

“Compared to what?”

This question came out reflexively, with real accusation, and Louise recognized her tone as belonging to the eldest daughter.

“Oh, never mind. I shouldn’t have said anything. I know how tiring a vacation can be.”

A cold silence passed between them, during which they kept walking down a charming little street, past all its charming little architecture, and when they came upon a clapboard sign advertising an open house they agreed, almost without speaking, to go in, to consider an apartment for sale in a city they both openly disdained.

A real-estate agent with a huge, demented smile stood at the entrance, handing out her card, which was printed with a portrait of her that looked much the same as she did in that moment—toothy grin, big hair. “Welcome, welcome,” she said. “Welcome.” And the welcomes kept coming out of her, compulsive and hopeful and for no one in particular.

Bruce and Louise made their rounds through this two-bedroom-one-and-a-half-bathroom-plus-office-nook “opportunity.” The finishes were nice, but the ceilings felt low, and it was unnecessary for either of them to say this aloud.

Louise’s phone buzzed in her pocket. It was Diana.

She’d been meaning to call, Diana explained, but so many things kept getting in the way. Louise said nothing in reply.

“Are you there? Where are you?”

“I’m looking at an apartment with Bruce.”

“A what? An apartment? And who is Bruce?”

“My friend? My friend Bruce?”

Louise made eye contact with Bruce as she said his name, and he seemed glad to be called her friend instead of merely the nurse who happened to respond to her minor vasovagal emergency on the plane and who was coincidentally an erstwhile acquaintance of her estranged father. It was nice, instead, to be a friend.

“Are you moving there? Why are you looking at an apartment?”

“Why not?”

Again Louise recognized the voice of the eldest daughter rising from her own throat.

“So, is this an O.K. time to talk?”

“I don’t think so.”

Just then the lights in the apartment flicked off and on, then off again, leaving them in the dark, so Louise hung up. She could tell that Diana was about to end things with her, but Louise had other problems, big problems, or maybe a million small ones. Low blood pressure. Anemia. Something with her dad. Maybe Bruce was her problem now, too. She wasn’t sure what to do about any of it.

The real-estate agent was frantically laughing and telling everyone not to panic, not to worry, that she’d get it all sorted out, but the crowd took this as their cue to leave, and, out in the street, Bruce said that he had to be going, had to pick up Elmo. They hugged goodbye.

“If you do check in with your sister or something, if you find out how Harry’s doing . . . well, let me know. Or tell him that you met me, if that feels right, or have your sister tell him that I said hello or, well, whatever feels right. And text me or call, if you’re comfortable with that. If you want to.”

She watched Bruce walk away from her, down the tree-lined street. She watched him with pointed attention, as if Bruce were someone she had loved enormously, a great love of her life whom mere circumstance had kept her from loving completely.

Louise continued her walk alone, and as dusk began to fall she felt an uptick in the ambient menace of the city, a real sense of mayhem. None of the streetlights were working, and the driverless cars were stalled everywhere. Passengers were abandoning them, like rats scuttling off a sinking ship, and people stood on the sidewalks, looking at their phones, or looking at the city, frowning, desperate. “What are we supposed to do—walk there? Walk two whole miles?”

But Louise, untroubled by their troubles, was having a conversation with Diana in her head.

“What about Halloween—what was that all about? Weren’t we in love, at least a little, at least right then?” But the imaginary Diana didn’t have anything to say in return; she pushed a lock of her hair behind one ear and looked out into the distance. “You know, you were the last thing I thought about before I died,” Louise told her.

“But you didn’t die,” the imaginary Diana corrected.

“I mean, when I thought I was about to die.”

But maybe she really was dying, because how would she know, because why had she passed out on the plane to begin with, and why did Bruce think that she looked sad? Without quite realizing it, she had walked into a high-end cosmetics store, full of mirrors reflecting back her bulging eyes and the bags beneath them.

A very pretty clerk with a motionless face approached her, but Louise just nodded and got her phone out to call her sister.

“Did something happen to Dad? Is he in Alaska?”

Many things, she was somehow surprised to learn from Jolene, had happened to her father.

“We decided not to say anything until you asked.”

“Well, I’m asking now.”

Her father had indeed moved to Alaska, first to a cabin with some kind of cat-sitting deal for a forest firefighter he’d met somewhere, but then he’d tried to stay for good, had gotten into a vague investment opportunity that didn’t go as he’d hoped. He’d gone broke, again, and then he’d had a mild stroke and was now stuck there. Luckily, the firefighter was back, and he was, it seemed, taking care of Harry, more or less.

Louise didn’t say much as her sister gave this report. She occupied herself with rubbing various serums and creams into her face, hoping they’d take immediate effect.

“Are you still there?”

“I’m here,” Louise said, defeated by the present.

“Well, I don’t want to tell you what to do,” Jolene said, lying. “But if you keep ignoring him you’ll regret it. You will.”

“I’m not ignoring him,” Louise corrected. “We’re ignoring each other. It’s mutual.”

Then the lights went out in the store, and one of the clerks shrieked in the dark, and another told her to remain calm. Outside, the street was now clogged with driverless cars, their high beams on, in confusion, in paralysis, lacking any traffic lights to tell them what to do. How natural it is to fail, to fail to decide, to remain in meaningless motion, like all those ants with their cockroach corpse, or like all of us; how active and yet inert life felt in this entirely too modern world.

Louise returned to the street with real intent, finally carrying her contradictory desires with total clarity, and a pilfered tube of eye serum in her pocket, something that promised to illuminate her from within. ♦

This is drawn from “My Stalkers.”

The best thing on the menu at Kelang, a Malaysian restaurant in Greenpoint that opened in December, is a puffy paratha on a bed of spiced red-lentil dal, topped with creamy Italian stracciatella cheese. Depending on who you are, where you’re from, and how rigid you are in your notions of gastronomic interpolation, this will strike you as either an absurd concept or a brilliant one. Kelang is part of a new crop of restaurants that celebrate the cultural synthesis of many immigrant groups that coexist in tight proximity to one another, from the Southeast Asian-kissed Italian American joint JR & Son to the Southern-meets-Sichuan fried-chicken spot Pecking House. What these places are doing isn’t “fusion” in the cynical sense, wherein a chef from one culture raids another for decorative elements. It’s something more personal, less calculated. Kelang’s paratha isn’t a pizza, but it’s not not a pizza; it’s chewy, wheaty, savory, creamy, and fresh, with a bit of heat in the dal and a brightening zing of green from a tangle of herbs on top.

This intermingling isn’t exactly a new phenomenon (birria ramen! Pastrami burritos! Gumbo!), but Kelang’s approach feels specific to this moment. Call it the second-generation turn: the cooking of children whose palates belong not to their parents’ homelands but to the cities that they were raised in; cooks making food that doesn’t attempt to re-create someplace distant, in space or in memory, so much as to reflect their actual lives, which are hybrid and hyphenated, deeply rooted yet widely branching. Kelang’s owner, Christopher Low, is an American-born son of Malaysian parents. He grew up in Brooklyn, eating his parents’ cooking in addition to the Haitian and Jamaican food of his neighbors and friends. In 2022, he, his parents, and his sister opened a restaurant, Hainan Chicken House, in Sunset Park, a counter-service spot named in celebration of a regional culinary export that’s hugely popular in Malaysia: poached chicken, fragrant with scallions and ginger, served with chicken-infused rice and sauces. The restaurant became a minor sensation—the titular dish is terrific, silken and subtle and rich, but what most stood out was a rotating lineup of specials, mostly hawker-style Malaysian fare, particularly the food of Klang, his parents’ home town, on Malaysia’s western coast.

At Kelang (the restaurant is named for an archaic spelling of the city’s name), those dishes are brought to the fore and woven with flavors from Low’s life in Brooklyn. There’s the paratha, of course, with its playful Neapolitan flourishes, but also a rendang, a Malaysian style of curry in which the sauce simmers down to almost a rich glaze, here made with tender shreds of oxtail—smoked first, Caribbean style. It’s served alongside rice cooked with mushrooms and herbs, a clever mashup of Malaysian nasi ulam and Haitian djon djon. Low isn’t the first to do a curry-chicken potpie, but his version is rich and warm, with airy, shattery pastry reminiscent of roti, flaky and slick with butter.

Not all dishes on the menu make you play a game of spot-the-references; some dishes are just terrific for terrific’s sake. Take, for instance, the clay-pot bak kut teh, featuring big hunks of pork (belly, trotter, rib) bobbling around in an intense, herbal broth in which they’ve braised for ages, or the “moonlight kway teow,” a stir-fried dish of wide rice noodles that are near-black with dark soy sauce, with a yellow orb of egg yolk in the center; its flavor is sultry and craggy from smoked clams and wok hei. Rojak, a spicy-savory fruit salad that’s a signature Malaysian dish, is made with seasonal fruit (guava and pineapple, among others, on my visits), plus crunchy cucumbers tossed in a gorgeous dressing tangy with fermented shrimp paste. Hainanese chicken—the dish that started it all—is available at dinner, and is impeccable: a steamy, silky half bird, foot coquettishly still attached, alongside a cluster of bowls containing sauces, rice, and a broth that strikes the ideal midpoint between fussy from-scratch freshness and bouillon nostalgia. I especially loved a dish of abacus seeds—chewy little dumplings made from taro, which the menu cheekily identifies as “gnocchi,” sauteed with smoked mushrooms and fiery chiles.

Low didn’t originally set out to become a restaurateur—he’s a filmmaker by training, and he’s cited the works of Wong Kar Wai as a primary influence on the interior design of Kelang. The space, previously a medical office, is boxy, with a certain high-ceilinged sterility, but Low has staged it like a movie set to conjure a lush, melancholy romanticism, with deep-red banquettes, tropical vines, gilt-edged mirrors, and, at the U-shaped bar, bent-bamboo chairs, with a boudoir-pink fringe. If the low, blushing lighting doesn’t get you in the mood for love, maybe a drink will help: a Martini dirtied up with a splash of fish sauce, a Negroni with notes of cherry blossom and lemongrass, or a Longsan Lahhh, a note-perfect non-alcoholic cocktail with smoky tea, fruit juice, and a bit of chile-pepper heat. Service, on my visits, was a bit spacey, but it’s been tightening up; the tone of the place seems to be in progress, too, oscillating between that of a neighborhood joint, an amorous date-night nook, and a sceney hot spot. But that sort of multiplicity plays well here: Kelang is a little bit of many things, all wrapped up together, in a way that totally works. ♦